WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will sign an executive order instructing the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.

“Today I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House.

He said the facility would be used to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And, tough.”

The US detention facility known as Guantanamo Bay on the coast of Cuba was set up in 2002 by then-president George Bush to detain foreign suspects following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2025